


Black is the Colour of my True Love's Hair

by leradny



Series: Fraochnait; or, "The Weaver" [1]
Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Character Study, Gen, In case you couldn't tell, Very tragic, a LITTLE bit of body image issues, and folk songs, i also love historical worldbuilding, i love heather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 21:28:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10750167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leradny/pseuds/leradny
Summary: Heather, from a young girl in the highlands to a young woman whose village is besieged by Alvin the Treacherous.





	Black is the Colour of my True Love's Hair

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU.
> 
> Moreover, an AU where I'm playing REALLY fast and loose with historical accuracy and the various forms of canon.
> 
> The first change is that Stoick's generation SETTLES Berk, when Hiccup says they've been there for generations. I forgot. And I don't really want to change it. So there you are.
> 
> Some of these songs are Too Modern for the vaguely medieval setting, but, well, there's dragons. I also played loose with Heather's age, since we don't, uh... actually KNOW how old she is. And also with how Gaelic Heather is. When I saw Heather I thought "Wow! She looks extremely Scottish and I Very Much Like This." Still can't shake it even after we know she was adopted. Scots and Vikings intermarried! Black hair is a dominant gene! ETC!!!
> 
> Since I play School of Dragons, as grown people do, I decided to split this character study into two parts. This is Heather's early life, right up till Alvin. The second is when she becomes a raider, and then the alchemist of Berk.
> 
> I started writing this in 2015, forgot about it for two years while I finished school, and then I found it again. I did some research to catch up and was absolutely APPALLED to learn of all the bad shit that happened to my favorite character while I was not watching the show.
> 
> So here's that same bad shit happening to my favorite character, but extended.

Gold makes the world go round.

Heather learns that young. The bright jingling coins in her father's purse are traded on market day for all sorts of wondrous things. If Heather was good the past week, which she usually was, she might have a bit of gold for herself. At first she would use it that very day, on fresh apples or little cakes or whatever merchant smiled and offered her a tidbit. But then she ran into a toymaker selling flutes and drums and dolls and pie tins which her lonely coin wouldn't buy, and that was when Heather learned to save for later.

There were people who stood by the fountain doing tricks with their hats on the ground, and if they drew a crowd, their hats filled up with gold. There were jugglers and dancers and singers, and sometimes a whole caravan would pass through. The songs they would sing were about gold too, most often about the hair on maiden's heads or the Fair Folk treasure in the hills. One day Heather's family made it late to the market, when the bargains are good but the talk isn't.

Heather wanders through the square looking for something to do with her coin. She has no interest in greens for half price or the cheapest sets of pots and pans. There is only one man at the fountain with a lute and a hat, and he's packing up to leave. Then he catches Heather's eye and says, "Would you like a song? This lute of mine isn't too tired to sing for such a bonnie lass. Aye, with your hair as sleek as a rook's feathers, and your eyes like the spring. You'll be a charmer when you're grown--or I'm a talking duck."

"Do you know any songs about girls with raven hair?" Heather asks. She is five, and she has never heard one. She's never heard someone speak like this about her hair, either. Her parents don't count. Everyone's parents call them bonnie, even when they're not.

"That I do, miss." Heather makes to drop her penny into the bard's hat, but he shakes his head and starts singing.

Heather clasps her hands together and listens to every word.

She spends the next week and the other running to the fountain, hoping the bard would come back and sing more songs about girls who looked like her. But of course he never does. When did a bard ever stay in one place? With the other singers, it's always golden hair, perhaps once a maid with red hair, but never black. And Heather thinks that a silly thing. Aren't her mother and father raven-haired? Aren't most everyone in their little village darkhaired? But no matter how fair the lads or lasses were, they'd never get stopped just for a comment on their locks, as the few tow-headed people were.

Whenever she feels very sad about it, Heather hums the song to herself:

"Black, black, black is the colour of my true love's hair..."

\- - -

A fleet of Norsemen make port by their town.

All the highborn folk wear green, of a shade she's never encountered before. The chieftess is proud and tall, even taller than Father. The chief is still taller, with his red beard in braids and shoulders as broad as the smith's beside him. They don't half-resemble the Fair Folk, all steel and muscle, many of them young and comely. Heather hangs back, afraid of them--the strange lines of their ships, their loud voices speaking words she's never heard, the chief's longsword and armor so bright in their square. She clutches Mother's hand.

Though the Norsemen have come with their wives and children, they are not settling in Heather's town. She's glad of that. There is an island further on that they are headed for, and they want to make it their own. It's full of birch trees and swarming with fish and wild sheep, and caves full of metal for smithing.

"Oh, you don't want that island," Heather's father says. "It's full of all those things, but dragons got there first. Best search on, friend. Or why not stay here? We'd make room for you."

The smith laughs and claps the chief on the shoulder. "There's no dragon we can't best, friend--not with Stoick to lead us."

In the year or two that pass, the Vikings find the island and make it their own. Not with gold, which means nothing to dragons, but with battle, and they name it Berk for the birch trees.

Every now and then, they reappear, a little more battered and singed than before. The smith loses an arm. Then a leg. The chieftain loses his wife. Either she died in childbirth, or as well as. Heather never learns exactly what happened. She doesn't want to. She clutches Mother's hand every time she sees the chieftain with his sad, fierce eyes and a babe in his arms. But she is awed by their strength, which seems to work for the things gold cannot buy.

As Heather grows, so do the children she had seen. There are two Norse girls with fabulous golden braids. One of them is very pretty and works hard according to her parents. She hauls buckets to douse fires, or chops wood with her hatchet for houses and ships. The other might be pretty, if she wasn't such a troublemaker. She still gets stopped and told how lovely her hair is. Heather doesn't learn their names in case she wishes to curse them, every time she hears someone say something like how blessed they are with such pretty golden locks. Or if yet another song comes up too soon after they've arrived. Heather feels like she could lay a curse, if she only knew how.

Sometimes Heather finds it funny that the Norse chief's son, of all people, has brown hair.

\- - -

Heather learns to cook, once she's tall enough to fetch buckets or herbs from the lower shelves. Puffs of flour on baking day turn her hair white. Father laughs and claims there's a ghost in the house. Or her locks fall on bread smeared with jam during breakfast, and suddenly she's got red-tipped hair or blue. Mother tuts and washes her hair out every time it's mussed, for black and gold hair are the quickest to stain.

On washing day, Heather watches her mother drop clothes into a special bucket on the counter, and they come out a bright yellow. And Heather thinks back to the times her hair has changed color. Perhaps if the songs aren't about her, she can try changing her hair to match the songs--at least until her mother washes it. But the counter is a smidge too high, so Heather stands on the tips of her toes and grips the counter top with one arm and squirms her other hand towards the bucket, as if she's pouring a bath for herself.

\- - -

Mother doesn't ask anything when she hears Heather's shriek. She comes in, sees Heather covered in dye, and rinses Heather's hair and clothes with the first bucket at hand. Heather's scalp still stings and burns after the first rinse, and she's crying. Father runs to the healers for a salve of comfrey and boiled brown kelp. Later that night when the pain has gone down, Mother washes and combs her hair one more time.

"A ghràidh, a ghràidh!" Eimhir says, combing the salve gently into Heather's hair from root to end. "You mustn't touch anything without asking first. These dyes are as bad as poison, they are. What if you'd swallowed it? Where would I be, my Fraochnait? My dear bonnie one!"

"No need to chide the lass, Eimhir," her father says. "T'was only an accident--wasn't it, Heather?"

Heather's so distraught and afraid and in pain that she doesn't tell anyone she did it on purpose. She has no plans of doing it again, anyway.

\- - -

Ten is about the age all the other children pick their trades, and Heather asks to study with Rhona the weaver. She learns when to pick tansy and chamomile for the brightest shades of yellow, and how to make other dyes darker, and that some cloth should not be dried in the sun after dying, and some dyes must be cooled before use. Before long, she's weaving tapestries as bold as the Vikings on Berk, or soft springtime blankets, or fine linen for beautiful dresses. This gives her a name in town, and among the other girls apprenticed to Rhona. And it's fun learning all the details and bits and bobs of such a complicated trade--so much fun that Heather half-forgets the reason she wanted to weave in the first place.

The thing which reminds her of it is when Rhona runs out of white fabric. She calls Heather and the other girls to watch, as they've never done this before. The weaving mistress sorts out lengths of the palest browns or greys, and makes sure that they are the same weight, then mixes a bath of lye for the cloth.

"Now lassies, don't you do this for cloth that's meant for finery," Rhona tells them. "The seamstresses will know the difference--yes, even from you, Heather."

Heather nods and laughs with everyone else at the good-natured rib.

"They'll have our heads. This is mostly for when you've used too much dye and you want a lighter shade. Or, if you water it down, it's for stained clothing."

The lye is divided later amongst the apprentices who need some. Heather takes a cup for herself. She has learned since her first experiment at six. Instead of pouring the bucket over her head, she clips a lock of her hair near the nape of her neck, which won't be missed. When dipped into the lye, it goes yellow, but crumples up in a ghastly manner after a day left to dry in the sun on her windowsill.

Well, that's that.

Heather won't ruin her locks. While she would like golden hair, she still remembers the song the minstrel played, and it stills her hand and calms her heart.

\- - -

When she is fourteen, her weaving mistress comes to call, and Rhona looks pleased as pie.

"Eimhir, Ruadhan, you should be proud of your lass. Heather is the canniest apprentice I've had in a long while. We've been making a killing off trade." Eimhir smiles broadly, and Ruadhan has his own little cat smile.

"Aye, our Heather's canny, and a bonnie lass too. There'll be songs about her when she's old enough." Ruadhan pats her shoulder, and Heather preens. "Now, what're you buttering us up for?"

"Why, all these merchants have been asking me where I'd been getting me dye stock, and I told him--right here!" Rhona pats her plump hand on Heather's shoulder. "Word's gotten round to Trader Johann as well. He's given a bid for this spring's dyes, and it's the biggest of all. He even asked if he could deal with Heather in person."

"You think my dyes are good enough for Trader Johann?" Heather smiles, but her mother and father look at each other and shake their heads.

"Absolutely not!" Eimhir says.

Ruadhan steps in front of her. "Rhona, thank ye kindly, but we'll not have Trader Johann dealing with Heather. He's a charming man, but he's loyal to naught but money. Perhaps when she's a master and can make her own decisions--but as long as she's your student, Trader Johann will deal with you."

Heather has mixed feelings about that--glowing at the thought that her parents believe she will be a master weaver one day, and pricked at how they are treating her like a child. She knows how money works, and she knows much her goods are worth, doesn't she?

She is still fourteen.

\- - -

Heather is fifteen when Alvin comes, and threatens them for navigation routes to Berk. And the village refuses, of course--for the Berk Norsemen are friends even if they are distant.

That is when they are laid under siege. The food becomes short when their trade routes are blocked off and their fishing boats sunk. The Berk Norsemen are the only ones with any hope of defeating Alvin's troop, but calling for aid is exactly what Alvin wants. Some people try to flee, and they are killed before they leave the shore.

Heather does not flee. In what seems like the blink of an eye, Heather goes from worrying about the precise tint of blue she had wanted for a new cloth she wanted to trade, to worrying about Mother and Father, who are not young enough to live on anger as she does, and they are not bred for fighting.

Heather's finest lengths of cloth are folded in a chest, gathering dust. She has some from the very first year of her apprenticeship, which she is still too proud of to simply use, and a loom with unfinished yardage that she was working on before the siege. When this is over, she swears, she will finish that length.

\- - -

Heather quietly heads to the square with the first of several loads of laundry.

Summer was a tight squeeze, but not so bad from Heather's point of view. Her face is still rounded, though her limbs thinner than usual. Her mother has aged more in the past few months than she should have, but she and Father are still hale. Yet at the fountain, it shocks her to see that many of the young mothers have drawn faces, and shiver in the light autumn breeze.

They've no warmer clothing on this chilly day than their usual dresses--they've wrapped the thickest shawls around their babes and given their sweaters to the young children instead. They have likely given their food away, too, to keep their children from crying of hunger. And the sight of them hurts, just as much as the thought of her own mother, with drawn face and shaking hands, washing patched clothing in the cold river on an empty stomach. Heather knows all their faces. She has knit with them, milked cows at the break of day, she has braided their hair and they hers, they have yelled at each other in tempers or given each other gifts on their name-days.

She washes fast, and less carefully than usual, and rushes home. In her room, she throws all of her beautiful fabrics from the past five years on the floor, and sharpens her scissors with a whetstone. While every snip of the shears is like a knife to her heart, she refuses to cry.

She sews, as fast as she can.

The cloth is made into shawls for grown women, tunics for men, clothes for children, and blankets and winter gear for everyone. Heather gives them away as soon as she finishes them, to everyone she sees. By the time Heather is sixteen, everyone in the village has something of Heather's to wear. Plain or sumptuous, they are all new and they are all Heather's best. Some good new clothes will help them through the worst of a siege winter, and that is what Heather has told everyone.

"Heather!" Mother says, scandalized as she unfolds a green silk shawl. It's fine as a cobweb, yet warm enough to serve even in winter. "This is too fine for your old mother!" Heather has to do more than a little bit of lying and arguing to get Eimhir to keep it.

"Why, child!" Rhona laughs as she receives the very best woolen cloak, the thickest cloth and the darkest indigo blue. "I'd no idea you had so much cloth squirreled away."

Heather has a parcel of children's clothes for Maeve. The most promising apprentice of the class right before Heather's, they ran into each other often enough to become good friends. Maeve has already started her own shop, gotten married, and is now expecting her second child. Heather knitted a sweater for her daughter, and Maeve promised her a place in her shop. Maeve looks at the detailed designs on her gifts, and then out to the square.

"So much cloth," Maeve says, carefully, as if there is a secret. There is. "You've clad everyone in the village by now. And such fine linens they are. Even by your hand, they're..." She brushes her fingers along the sleeve of her own homespun dress, well-made but not the same quality. "I mean to say that if I were the one who made these--and we're a match in speed, you know--I'd have been saving cloth since I started my apprenticeship, at the very least."

A lump comes up in Heather's throat. She tries to smile, and does poorly, and shrugs.

"Oh, Heather!" Maeve clasps Heather's hands in hers. "Heather, you used your _dowry?_ "

"I can make more," Heather says, and bursts into tears.


End file.
